Last week we delivered the first Webinar in Season 2 of our Better Webinars series with Demand Metric. The event was a lot of fun as we took the 20 Questions Model and our shot clock for answers.
The questions were all outstanding Webinar questions that Demand Metric had received from their community of over 80,000 members and ranged from “Where do you start in planning a webinar program” to specific questions around Promoting events and the use of video.
One question we were not able to answer live, that came in during the webinar was:
“What is appropriate for promoting your on-demand Webinar?”
I found the phrasing of the term “appropriate” interesting and understand the concern. A standard promotional schedule for a Webinar is 4-5 weeks which includes three or more email drops to a database to recruit an audience. So if they didn’t register the first time do you really want to invite them to the archive and risk the dreaded unsubscribe?
I answered the Marketer’s question offline but thought I would use our webinar as a working case to showcase what we believe is appropriate and even more importantly, effective.
Sorry we missed you.
Your primary market are those that registered for your event but could not make it. Our data shows the sooner the better with these emails. Our ‘Sorry We Missed You’ email was auto generated and sent out for 4 p.m. that same afternoon.
Immediate passive promotion.
We had planned to focus primary messaging for the next five weeks on engagement with the Webinar and therefore, had a blog post ready to go the day after the event on this topic. The post included a clip from the webinar which covered this topic and linked back to the Webinar and our YouTube video player. To strengthen this, we added further clips from the same Webinar to our YouTube page to kick off Better Webinars Season Two.
Promoting the event back to our base.
We have done joint webinars with Demand Metric in the past and generally speaking, have seen a higher success rate on promotions than this time around. Typically 20 percent of our registrants come in from our promotions and actual viewers are slightly higher.
So we had a look at the promotional material for this webinar. See the invite here.
While the topic of having a Webinar expert come in to address 20 questions from their community made sense for Demand Metric, for our prospects this was a pretty generic topic smeared with a high level of self-promotion and therefore, did not covert like our past promotions.
But the event itself was great and those who did view it were highly engaged (higher than average engagement score) with many people reaching out thereafter. This lead us to the conclusion that we needed to change the message for the archive promotions.
From feedback, the fun tone of the Webinar resonated well, therefore the promotion will follow on that success.
We recognized that we had a lot of engagement around the use of on-demand and questions (like the one that prompted this blog) around the use of on-demand Webinars and so we used that to tweak the on-demand promotional page to address that messaging.
We also embed the clip of John from Demand Metric and myself introducing the shot clock in the on-demand registration page to ensure that the fun aspect of the webinar is front and center.
This social push and email to our base will be the last in our promotion cycle for this Webinar for the quarter. We plan to use this Webinar again as a command performance later in the year but this promotional cycle should get us to our target numbers.
We will update this post when this cycle completes and look forward to sharing the data!
Matt
